Modern/Not Modern---The New Quilt

Wilene Smith found this rare Winifred Avery pattern for a "gazelle eating calico leaves off this stiff-looking plant,"  In 1933 she wrote she'd seen the design on a quilt a hundred years old . Like the Thistle spread last week from Modern Priscilla, Winifred's very modern quilt did not inspire her audience.

But quiltmakers seemed to respond enthusiastically to

patterns that mixed modern shape and abstract prints

with a Colonial Revival nostalgia.

See more on sentimentalism and quilts here:

http://historicallymodernquilts.blogspot.com/2013/10/sentimental-modernism-in-quilts.html

Modern and Colonial Revival seem to have

little in common, but somehow the Modern/AntiM-odern

(as Marin Hanson terms it) combined in the vernacular.

It's the Hegelian dialectic!

Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis

Sort of Marxian, if you will.

See Marin Hanson's discussions of  "Modern, Yet Anti-Modern: Two Sides of the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Quiltmaking"  in Uncoverings #29 here at the Quilt Index:

http://www.quiltindex.org/journals/article.php?Akid=2-B-7F